


Station to Station

by superblackmarket



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: M/M, joe and nicky are history's muses, west berlin 1977
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-25
Updated: 2020-09-25
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:40:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26646166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superblackmarket/pseuds/superblackmarket
Summary: “No offense,” Nile says, “but it seems like you guys kind of peaked in the Renaissance.”OR, when Nile challenges their modern-day credentials, Nicky and Joe regale her with a strange tale of love and debauchery in 1970s West Berlin.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 82
Kudos: 515





	Station to Station

“No offense,” Nile says, “but it seems like you guys kind of peaked in the Renaissance.”

“Excuse me?” Nicky is on the couch, Joe situated between his knees, as he works a leave-in conditioner through Joe’s damp curls. Humidity has not been Joe’s friend this summer; at least, it has not been a friend to his hair, and Nicky is trying to restore some sort of order before Joe gets frustrated and buzzes the whole mop off, which would be a loss to Nicky if not to Joe. “We peaked?”

“All the paintings, all the poems,” Nile elaborates. “To hear Andy tell it, you inspired everyone from Petrarch to Michelangelo, and then… _poof_.”

“Poof?” Joe repeats.

“Yeah, poof. I mean I know you still turned up occasionally, here and there, but you weren’t, like, _muses_ anymore, were you?”

“Harsh, Nile,” Joe says, dropping his head forward to give Nicky better access. “Very harsh. And completely false. We didn’t _peak_ , we just got better at covering our tracks.” 

“Damage control,” Nicky explains.

“You can find us, appropriately concealed, in some of the best music and art of the modern era,” Joe says grandly, and Nicky tugs on his hair.

“Show some modesty, Yusuf.”

“It’s true—”

“Name one thing,” Nile challenges. “And no revisionist history, Joe, I’m onto you now.”

“Do you hear that, my love? Nile is on to you,” Nicky scratches lightly at his scalp, and Joe presses his forehead into his knee with a soft groan. Then he tips his head back to look at him, eyes sparkling with mischief.

“Shall we tell her about Berlin, Nicolò?”

***

In West Berlin, life took place mostly at night.

Nicky and Joe struggled to reorient themselves. Even though they were accustomed to keeping strange hours, they were not nocturnal people. They enjoyed morning coffee and morning sex, Joe in particular enjoyed a good lie-in, but they rarely slept the daylight away. The sun kept them honest. Nicky thought surely he and Joe were too ancient to reinvent themselves as vampiric night-creatures who wore leather trench coats and skulked through dark alleys.

But West Berlin was a city flipped on its head, an island in a sea of red, and it made unusual demands of them. Highly subsidized and still neglected, it was a hotbed of strange subcultures and leftist politics, and the four of them were playing a perilous game with the Red Army Faction—namely, expediting the denazification of the government while foiling some of the more reckless acts of what could only be termed terror. Perhaps owing to the relative youth of the RAF members, most of their scheming took place at night. Nicky and Joe would drag themselves out of bed at sundown, round up Andy and Booker, and head for the discotheques, where partying and politics had merged into a singularly decadent kind of nightlife.

“I feel like thrice-boiled shit,” Booker groaned as they trudged home through the dirty streets at dawn after a long night of subterfuge. They’d been in the city for several months then, and Nicky felt strung-out and frazzled, like a great throbbing synthesizer had taken up residence in his skull.

“Well, maybe you should stop sampling the local pharmaceuticals,” he said tartly.

“It keeps me up,” Booker insisted. “Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.”

“Oh, we have,” Joe said. “Back when Freud was still touting the stuff. It’s habit-forming, you know.”

“Ehhh.” Booker shrugged.

“Do you really want to end up addicted to the same drug that made the Nazis think it was a clever idea to invade Russia?” Nicky asked, settling his sunglasses more firmly on the bridge of his nose.

“I used to hallucinate white snakes creeping over my skin,” Andy remarked, sounding almost nostalgic.

Nicky winced, recalling a particular night in Vienna towards the end of the previous century. He’d been on his hands and knees, getting fucked, with Joe behind him, doing the fucking, when Andy had burst into their bedroom shouting about snakes. They’d sprung apart, naked and disheveled, to come to her aid; only after a frantic shakedown of her clothing did they realize the serpents existed solely in her mind, courtesy of Dr. Freud’s favorite health tonic. Andy had taken some convincing, though. And then she’d sprawled across their bed, chattering away in a most un-Andylike way until she abruptly fell asleep. They shifted her over to the far side of the bed so they could finish what they’d started. Post-orgasm, they surfaced to find Andy watching them, bug-eyed and pink with suppressed laughter.

Now Joe’s hand brushed over his, and Nicky knew his thoughts had traveled to the same place. “Very memorable, boss,” Joe agreed.

Andy smirked and lit a cigarette. 

“Well, I have more,” Booker said, tapping his pocket. “If anybody’s interested.”

“We’ve been up all night,” Joe pointed out.

“And don’t you want to celebrate the fact that Potsdamer Platz will _not_ be blowing up as scheduled?”

Nicky considered Booker’s profile, handsome and a little wasted-looking in the grey dawn. He was worried about him. Admittedly, he always worried about Booker, but the strange mood of postwar Europe, the combination of nihilism and ennui, seemed to be affecting him worst of all. These days Booker operated under the impression that he was merely “passing through”; he didn’t care where he’d come from and cared less where he was going, and the present was futile and surreal. He ate little but boozed heavily and ingested critically unfair amounts of chemicals.

“Fine,” Nicky said, slightly brittle. “Let’s celebrate then. Joe?” 

Joe’s eyebrows rose above the dark frames of his sunglasses, but he nodded.

“What the hell,” Andy said.

Perhaps the mood was infecting them all, Nicky thought. 

They were renting a flat on the second floor of a five-storey building on Hauptstraße, located in the predominantly Turkish Schöneberg neighborhood. It was a cold-water flat, which Joe and Booker had strenuously objected to, but Nicky and Andy had overridden them, arguing that Schöneberg was the most permissive quarter of the divided city, and their traveling ménage à quatre would attract less attention in that sort of environment. Joe cheered up when he discovered that nearly every café offered Turkish coffee; sometimes the promise of a cuppa and a bal kaymak was the only way Nicky could lure him out of bed in the evening.

Their first-floor neighbor was leaving the building as they entered. Politely, Joe stood aside and held the door for him; the gentleman thanked him in English-accented German. Then the four of them dragged themselves up the stairs to their flat.

“If we were alone,” Joe said in Italian, as they washed up in the tiny bathroom, “I would do lines off your stomach, and then I would lick you very slowly all over.”

“You wouldn’t be doing lines off anything if we were alone,” Nicky said tiredly. He wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed with Joe and sleep until their next operation with the RAF in two days’ time. “Joe, we need to take better care of Sebastien, and I wish I had a better idea than stir-frying whatever is left of our minds, but right now I don’t.”

They sagged into each other, exchanging a few weary kisses. Joe’s cheeks had accumulated enough stubble to chafe, and Nicky loved the abrasiveness of it, the redness that flared and vanished, flared and vanished. Then they joined Andy and Booker in the kitchen, where Booker was meticulously cutting lines on the table. Nicky switched on the radio and poured everyone a tall glass of water. When it was his turn, he took the rolled-up D-Mark from Joe and inhaled sharply.

After they had exhausted Booker’s supply of blow—or at least Nicky hoped they had—the others drifted into the living room while Nicky rifled through the cupboards. There was no greater testament to their collective malaise than an empty pantry. “Would anyone… like anything to eat?” he called out, a little feebly, having turned up nothing but milk and eggs and a wizened bell pepper.

Silence from the living room. “No thank you, Nico,” Joe called back after moment. “Why don’t you come over and join us?”

The flat was poorly furnished, with limited seating options, so Nicky decided not to squeeze himself onto the sagging futon with Joe and Andy. He sat on the floor with Booker, discreetly pulling the handgun from the back of his trousers and unloading it. Joe and Booker exchanged a few words about the bombing they had managed to avert; Andy lit her umpteenth cigarette of the morning and stared into space. Nicky rubbed his nose, already bored, and thought about fetching a book.

Sometime later, he found himself kneeling in front of the radio, contemplating the emanations of divine energy, while Yusuf lectured Andromache and Sebastien on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Kabbalah was enjoying a trendy bit of cachet amongst the artistic avant-garde, and Joe—in Nicky’s opinion—expended a lot of unnecessary energy trying to contextualize the cosmic dabblings of a generation too coked out to know the difference between mysticism and demonology. “The Sephirot are neither things nor acts, but rather are relational events, and so are persuasive representations of what ordinary people encounter as the inner reality of their daily lives,” Joe intoned, as Andy and Booker ignored him for a bottle of brandy. “Moving from Kether to Malkuth means descending from the crown of creation to the earthly kingdom.” 

As Joe gained steam with his lecture, Nicky spun the radio dial, a mystic ritual unto itself, and pondered the Stations of the Cross. He got to his feet and began to chart out the fourteen steps along Christ’s march to death, pushing Sebastien and bits of furniture out of his way as he went. It was a devotion he hadn’t practiced in centuries, if at all since becoming immortal, and it seemed rather frightening now. He accelerated like a runaway train, speeding through railway and radio stations, losing himself in the tunnels of his overheated brain.

He couldn’t slow down, and the song on the radio was warping the scenery into a blur, but the pleasure of the groove was so intense that he decided to stay on the train a bit longer. “ _It’s not the side effects of the cocaine_ ,” the singer yelped suddenly, “ _I’m thinking that it must be loooooove_!” and Nicky agreed completely. He grabbed Joe by the arm and dragged him into the bedroom, where he proceeded to strip him naked and tumble him into bed.

The initial rush had begun to wear off; the locomotive was slowing. Nicky indulged in a leisurely stretch, looking down at Joe. Joe was reclining on the unmade bed, hands folded behind his head, grinning lazily back up at him. Nicky thought him delectable in the sunlight, with his dilated pupils and tousled hair, cock half-hard and growing harder still under Nicky’s gaze. He sat on the edge of the mattress and ran his fingertips along Joe’s collarbone. “How are you feeling, love?”

“Almost back to normal. It’s got a pretty short half-life.” Joe captured his hand and kissed his knuckles. “I am… _awake_ , though.”

“I can see that, yes.” He smiled.

“Nicolò, my beloved…?” A dangling question. 

Nicky bent down and kissed him. Joe’s stubble was a delicious scratch against his chin, and the bitter, chemical taste in his mouth receded with Joe’s tongue moving wetly against his own. He splayed his hand over Joe’s ribs and shifted closer. Joe pulled at his hair, which was short on the sides and longer on top, and Nicky allowed his head to be manipulated this way and that as Joe attacked his mouth with new ferocity. He draped himself over Joe’s chest and rolled his hips, mindful of belt and zipper against bare skin.

Joe cupped him through his trousers. “These are so tight,” he murmured, “I can’t imagine this is healthy for your circulation.”

“It’s the fashion,” Nicky pointed out. He shrugged out of his shirt and accepted Joe’s help peeling the black fabric down his legs.

“I prefer you like this, in the original fashion,” Joe said.

Nicky smiled.

And then he told him: “I want you to split me in half.”

“I want you to sit on my face,” Joe said.

He let Joe mold him like clay. His limbs softened under the heat of Joe’s hands, until they could be manipulated at will by their patient sculptor. His muscles, otherwise dependable, trembled and gave out when he tried to kneel over Joe’s face. Joe was counting on this, of course—he claimed to derive immense pleasure from being smothered in Nicolò, Nicolò, Nicolò. So Nicky sank down, into the scrape of Joe’s stubble over his most delicate skin, and then Joe’s tongue breached him and he was no use at all, melting into a liquid state of pure sensation. Ripples of ecstasy traveled through him, making his cock throb and his body open, lotus-like, around Joe’s clever, twisting tongue.

Joe was red-faced and panting when Nicky finally pulled away, but that didn’t stop him from professing, breathlessly, “I would die a thousand deaths just for the pleasure of doing that.”

Nicky reminded him that he had.

“Making love to you is like hearing millions and millions of words that haven’t been spoken yet,” Joe said. “I think that’s why I still haven’t found an adequate vocabulary to describe the experience.”

Nicky braced his palms against Joe’s shoulders to lever himself downward. He found the lube stashed under the pillow and reached back to finish making himself ready, shaking his head when Joe tried to do it for him. If Joe got involved again, he would never make it to the main event. A perfunctory bit of stretching, and he deemed himself prepared. He craved the burn, he wanted to feel every last inch as he lowered himself onto Joe’s cock.

And he did: lip caught between his teeth, he made a descent so slow it was almost intolerable to them both. Joe’s hands flexed against his hips, but he let him control the pace. Nicky had the ocean in mind, the way the waves came in slowly, tugging strength from far back. The moment before they somersaulted, the moment when they arched their backs so beautifully—that moment was excruciating. Then they—they, the waves; they, Yusuf and Nicolò—finally cracked, dashing fiercely upon the sand in a frothy torrent of exultation.

Fueled on dopamine, he did most of the work. Lifting himself with his thighs, rising until only the tip of Joe’s cock remained inside him, hovering there till Joe begged and swore, then slamming back down. Joe was generous with his praise when he did, panting endearments in a mishmash of Italian and Arabic, and Nicky ached with affection. His Yusuf was a vision like this, every piece of him perfection, muscles taut and rippling as he fought to hold himself still. And his eyes, those profound repositories of feeling—. Yusuf’s love was warm and visceral, something Nicolò could bathe in. No matter how miserable the latitude or debauched the decade, they would always have this, their private divinity. 

But it did occur to Nicky that they were taking rather longer than usual to finish, their bodies drawing on strange reserves of stamina that kept them on the brink; in his mind, they had climaxed several times already. Except they hadn’t, had they? There was no evidence of it. And they were supposed to be celebrating with Andy and Booker—

“We should—hurry,” he said. “Yusuf, please, I need—” 

“I have you,” Joe promised, taking him in hand and beginning to stroke. Nicky threw back his head, ready for the release that was only a few strokes away—. And then the grip on his cock slackened, and _Joe_ came with no warning whatsoever, just an abrupt snap of his hips and a profusion of liquid heat deep inside Nicky’s body.

Surprised and a little miffed at this turn of events, Nicky rode him through it. “Well, that was very droll of you,” he commented, when Joe had finally stilled beneath him.

“I make no excuses,” Joe said. “Your body is exquisite. Come here and let me finish taking care of you.”

He was maneuvered into his earlier position over Joe’s face. This time he fed him his cock in careful increments, put in mind once more of the ocean waves, bouncing upward and forward, a final surge before petering out into a small stream which raced up the beach and was then recalled.

They were sharing a postcoital cigarette, Nicky curled into Joe’s side, when Booker appeared in the doorway. The _doorway_. Nicky cringed; they had forgotten to close the door. 

“You’re fucking shameless,” Booker said.

Joe’s arm tightened around his shoulders. They were naked, in that particularly languid, insouciant manner of the well-fucked, and Nicky’s fingers twitched for the sheet to cover them. But that seemed too much like Adam and Eve cowering before an angry god, so he merely plucked the cigarette from Joe’s mouth. “Forgive us,” he said, pulling smoke into his lungs. “Inhibitions were lowered.”

“Andy saw snakes,” Booker said, shifting his weight back and forth, “but I wouldn’t let her come in here to get you. I almost had to fight her.”

“Very thoughtful, we appreciate it,” Joe said.

“ _White_ snakes,” Booker insisted, as if that detail held particular significance.

“It’s a hallucination unique to her,” Joe elaborated, “perhaps derived from something long-forgotten in her past. Freud himself didn’t know what to make of it. Though he suggested that she might be suffering from a repressed desire to have relations with a mythical Greek king, or with his mother. Of course, knowing Andromache, she probably did have relations with both—and nothing repressed about it.”

Joe liked to talk about repression around Sebastien, and he wasn’t overly subtle about it.

“I’m about to crash,” Booker said. “Are you done with the bed?”

“Just give us a moment, please, Booker,” Nicky said.

“Change the sheet.” Booker left, pulling the door emphatically shut behind him.

“That was my mistake,” Nicky said, ashing the cigarette into an empty glass.

“I didn’t notice either,” Joe said, and pressed a kiss to his temple. “How goes it, my heart? Are you crashing, too?”

Nicky took a moment to evaluate. The high had passed, but he did feel strangely alert, like his neurotransmitters had been hotwired by an overzealous electrician. “No,” he said. “But I don’t think I am going to be able to sleep any time soon, either.”

“Nor I.” Joe sighed and dragged a heavy hand through his hair, making the curls spring out every which way. “Not in the mood to read or draw, though. Too jittery.”

“Do you want to go out, then? Take advantage of the daylight?”

“Coffee first,” Joe stipulated.

“Naturally.”

“Naturally.” Joe smiled. “I love you.”

They dressed in softer, looser clothes than they had worn out the previous night—better to blend in with the daytime crowd—and changed the linens. Leaving the bedroom, they found Andy frying eggs in the kitchen, a slightly manic set to her jaw as she wielded the spatula. They edged past her, politely declining her invitation for breakfast, and said goodbye to Sebastien. He gazed at them with bloodshot eyes and offered a weary sort of salute that hovered a moment too long in the air.

“Don’t… don’t do that,” Nicky said, suddenly queasy. “You look like you’re… heiling.”

“God forbid,” Sebastien said, looking nauseated, and dropped his head into his hands.

West Berlin was a very queasy place in those days.

They stopped at their favorite café for coffee and pastries and commenced to wandering the streets, cups of steaming Turkish coffee clutched in their hands. They dipped into a cornershop for cigarettes and a paper, and they read the headlines aloud to each other as they meandered east along the canal. The sun disappeared behind a cloud, casting the city in grainy flickering light, almost like an old newsreel. As they traversed Potsdamer Platz, busy and humming with morning commuters, the previous night already seemed to Nicky like a bad dream. Had any of it really happened? He put the question to Joe, rhetorically, but Joe squinted at him like he’d lost his mind.

“You don’t remember defusing the bomb?” he said incredulously.

“Of course, I meant only that—”

“Because you nearly cut the wrong wire,” Joe snapped, “and splattered yourself all over this fucking plaza.”

“I, I didn’t,” Nicky protested, knocked off-balance by the sudden souring of his mood. “The light was poor, but I—”

“It’s all pointless anyway. What’s one bomb? The RAF will build more bombs.”

“A bomb that doesn’t go off—” Nicky began mildly, but Joe steamrolled past him.

“The next time we’ll be too late, and they’ll blow the bloody train station six ways to Sunday. But here you are, patting yourself on the back, wrapped in a cocoon of cocaine and messianic self-importance, just like every other asshole in this town.”

Nicky bit the inside of his cheek, tasting the acrid chemical residue again. He reached for the pack of cigarettes in his pocket and lit one, buying himself time to think. Joe’s temper had been somewhat unpredictable since they had arrived in Berlin. He would explode into a litany of complaints at the slightest provocation—the cold-water plumbing was a regular culprit—but Nicky found it easy enough to coax him back into a better humor. Usually with sex, because Joe could never be surly after a blowjob. But coffee also worked in a pinch. Joe’s grievances were petty enough that he forgot them after he came or woke up properly.

But this was… different, Nicky realized, as he tried to pass the cigarette to Joe and found himself childishly rebuffed.

“No,” Joe said, frowning, sullen. “I want my own.”

Nicky obliged, digging the pack out again, and let Joe take his pick. Joe even insisted on lighting it himself, snatching the matchbook right out of Nicky’s hand. 

Nicky knew, intellectually, that it was silly to be hurt over such a small thing. But he and Joe always, _always_ , shared a single cigarette, passing it back and forth between them. They never lit two at once; if they came to the end of the first and wanted another, well, they shared that one, too. It was one of their little rituals that Nicky took for granted, just like he took for granted that he slept facing the door with Joe pressed to his back, arms snug around his waist.

Joe had to be in a real strop to demand his own cigarette.

They walked on, puffing on their separate cigarettes and staring straight ahead. As far as Nicky knew, they had no real destination in mind. He brooded silently, trying to disentangle the threads of Joe’s ire. The uneasy alliance with the RAF wore on all of them; the decadent, inverted lifestyle didn’t help. Nor did the transience—they used to spend years, decades even, in a single place; now they scrambled from city to city, country to country, always half a step behind the latest catastrophe. And then there was West Berlin itself—bleak and adrift, scarred physically and psychically. Even now, it was difficult not to look at anyone over the age of forty and wonder if they had been a Nazi, or if their parents had. The rich expressiveness of the German tongue, its delightful hyper-specificity, had been tarnished by the ranting demagogue who’d used the language of Dichter und Denker to whip the masses into a murderous frenzy. Nicky didn’t enjoy speaking German so much these days.

The two of them crossed Köthener Straße, and as they passed Hansa Studios, Nicky heard a strange soundscape—not quite music—drifting through the window, layers of ambient synthesizer and a detached drum pulse that crept into his bloodstream and made his heart beat faster.

He looked up and realized they were standing in the shadow of the Wall. Walking through West Berlin, one always seemed to end up at the Wall sooner or later. He could see the guard tower on the opposite side, could even make out the Russian Red Guards with the little stars on their fuzzy hats. It filled him with foreboding, the barbed wire and the two Berlins within sight of each other but utterly divided.

Finally, he looked at Joe. Joe’s shoulders were hunched, his hands jammed deep in his pockets. Joe was a complicated man—they were all complicated people, having been alive so unnaturally long—but it was seldom that Joe made himself so opaque, so closed-off.

Nicky held out his hands, palms up. “Yusuf,” he said gently, “what can I do?”

Joe didn’t immediately take his hands, but he did look at him. Nicky wasn’t surprised to see that his eyes were wet. “I don’t know. I keep thinking, the world spins so quickly now, what if we are no longer able to keep pace with it?”

Nicky reached for him on the pretext of adjusting his scarf. But really he was stroking his neck, thumb grazing over the hinge of his jaw. “The world spins as it always has, my love. I think it’s the great and terrible interconnectedness of things that creates the illusion of acceleration.”

Joe leaned into the caress, ever so slightly.

“And Booker’s drugs probably didn’t help. I should have known better. Cocaine always works better as anecdote than reality, don’t you think?”

Joe huffed a laugh and nodded.

“I did feel… good, though,” Nicky admitted. “Not quite like a savior, but—”

“I shouldn’t have said that,” Joe interrupted. “It was a fucking shitty thing to say, and I didn’t mean it. You haven’t got a messianic bone in your body, Nicolò.”

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not. Please forgive me.”

Nicky kissed him instead. A brutal, yearning kiss that landed with a slight clack of teeth and sent reverberations through their bodies. It was a kiss that had taken eight and a half centuries to perfect, the kind of kiss that could only be exchanged by lovers who were grounded in time even as they stood outside of it.

Gunfire erupted over their heads and they sprang apart, hands going to the weapons concealed in their coats as they looked about wildly for the source. Shouts from above: Nicky tilted his head back and met the glaring eyes of one of the guardsmen, who was bellowing at them in Russian and gesturing angrily with his machine gun. “I think they’re trying to scare us off,” he remarked, a little breathlessly.

“We should probably run,” Joe said, and Nicky thought he looked oddly joyful for a man being threatened at gunpoint. “Yes, Nico my love, we should definitely run.”

They ran.

***

“Yeah, no, I don’t buy that for a second,” Nile says.

“What’s not to believe?” Joe says. “It’s not far-fetched. The recording studio overlooked the Wall, and he saw us through the window.”

“He could’ve seen anybody,” Nile reasons. “You’re not the only people who ever kissed there.”

“Show her the article, Joe,” Nicky suggests, before things can get out of hand. Nile has a robust twenty-first-century skepticism for anything that comes out of the mouths of nine-hundred-and-fifty-year-old men, and sometimes it’s simplest to cut to the chase. Hands still busy with Joe’s hair, he nudges him with an elbow. “You can bring it up on your mobile.”

Joe takes out his iPhone and noodles around for a minute. “Believe, non-believer,” he says, passing it to Nile. She settles next to him on the floor, and Nicky can’t resist peering over her shoulder.

Nile reads the headline aloud: “ _Thirty Years On, Bowie Reveals the Lovers of Iconic Song Were Both Male._ ”

“That’s right,” Joe says smugly. “Keep reading.”

Nile skims for the salient bits. “ _Bowie claims he withheld their identities because he didn’t want to land them in trouble for their ill-timed snog. ‘I actually knew them by sight,’ he says. ‘We lived in the same building on Hauptstraße, they rented the flat above mine for a few months in ’77. Lovely chaps, always very polite. A German and a Turk, I believe_ —’”

“It is always flattering,” Nicky cannot help but interject, “to be taken for a native speaker.”

“He was fucking British, what did he know?” Joe grumbles, still sore about the Turk thing. Nicky chides him gently—a perfectly honest mistake, Schöneberg _was_ a Turkish neighborhood at the time and how was Bowie to know that the two of them had lived through the Ottoman Empire? To his credit, he had not mistaken Yusuf for a Persian, which surely would have displeased him more…?

Nile clears her throat.

“Please, continue,” Nicky says, squeezing Joe’s shoulders with his knees.

“ _Mostly, Bowie was relieved the men escaped without injury. ‘I really thought they might be shot,’ he says. ‘But they fucking legged it.’_ ”

Nile looks at Joe, who is positively vibrating with smugness beside her, and then back at Nicky. “Okay… I’m maybe willing to entertain the possibility that you aren’t lying about this.”

“We would never lie, Nile, not about the manner in which we inspired a great artist to write one of the most beloved songs ever recorded,” Nicky says gravely.

Joe urges Nile to keep going: they both cherish the words that follow and love to hear them read aloud, even though they’ve committed the entire interview to memory and will recite it at the slightest provocation.

Nile rolls her eyes but obeys: “ _Despite the ironic quotation marks he put around the title, Bowie insists that the men sharing the kiss really were heroes. ‘The only heroic act one can fucking well pull out of the bag in a situation like that is to get on with life and derive some joy from the very simple pleasure of remaining alive, despite every attempt having been made to kill you._ ’”

Nicky hums in agreement: too true, especially when one is talking about forever, or something like forever. 

“It really was one of our best kisses,” Joe says. “Top ten. Very song-worthy.”

“Naturally, Andy despises it,” Nicky sighs. “She changes the station every time it comes on the radio, even now. No respect for the dead.”

***

Joe grabbed his hand and they sprinted away from the Wall.

Away from the soldiers, away from the guns.

They dodged bicycles and pedestrians, Joe laughing madly as they nearly got crushed under a Volkswagen speeding through a traffic light. They tore along the streets hand-in-hand, and people stopped to stare at them, which only seemed to spur Joe to new heights of mirth. Their pace didn’t slow until they turned onto Hauptstraße, where they doubled over, panting to catch their breath.

Joe was flushed with exertion and merriment, pupils contracted to their normal size.

Nicky reached over and brushed the sweaty curls off his brow. “That was invigorating,” he said. 

“Not the most heroic exit we might have made, but…” Joe winked, and Nicky smiled back.

“It would have been a shame to die for such a perfect kiss.”

_I, I can remember  
__standing by the wall  
__and the guns shot above our heads  
__and we kissed  
__as though nothing could fall  
__and the shame was on the other side_  
  
David Bowie, “‘Heroes’”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! The historical backdrop for this one is David Bowie recording his album 'Heroes' in West Berlin amidst East/West Cold War tensions and the peak of RAF militant activities. The biographical details of Bowie's life at the time are mostly correct; I've just slipped Joe, Nicky & co. into the narrative. The kissing couple Bowie saw from the studio window was, in fact, the record producer and one of the backup singers (but Bowie kept that secret for several decades because the producer was married at the time). The "interview" Nile reads at the end is adapted from various real interviews that Bowie gave over the years (tweaked to make it Joe & Nicky), and the last quote about "the only heroic act" is verbatim. 
> 
> The song Nicky hears on the radio is Bowie's "Station to Station," the title song of an album Bowie recorded in 1976 and later had no memory of making because he was doing so much cocaine at the time. So. Much. Cocaine. 
> 
> As always, I love to hear your thoughts! Thank you again for reading.
> 
> ETA: During the 1970s, Bowie was one of the many artists intrigued with Kabbalah, an ancient branch of Jewish mysticism, and the album "Station to Station" contains multiple allusions to Kabbalistic concepts. But he was also snorting massive quantities of cocaine, so his apprehension of Kabbalah was a bit dodgy, to say the least. In this story, Joe's mini-lecture on the subject is poking fun at Bowie and his ilk--Joe is not equating Kabbalah itself with demonology or "cosmic dabblings," and neither am I! I sincerely apologize if my writing gave that impression. I consulted Harold Bloom's "Kabbalah and Criticism" for Joe's overview of the Sephirot because David Bowie--a short-lived Kabbalah enthusiast walking the precarious line between appreciation and appropriation--should not be anyone's source for Kabbalah scholarship.


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